#SANCTUS VIII: TRANSFIGURATION
You can watch the video at this link.
When He took the three disciples to the mountainside to pray His countenance was modified, his clothing was aflame Two men appeared; Moses and Elijah came They were at his side The prophecy, the legislation spoke of whenever he would die Then there came a word Of what he should accomplish on the day Then Peter spoke, to make of them a tabernacle place A cloud appeared in glory as an accolade They fell on the ground A voice arrived, the voice of God The face of God, covered in a cloud
What do we do with a story like the Transfiguration? Jesus prays with three disciples. Two men appear. Jesus radiates light and a voice resounds: “listen to him.” This is a classic theophany--a manifestation of God--and everything about it is baffling. As Edgardo Colón-Emeric puts it: “When one reads the gospel accounts of the Transfiguration, it is easy to empathize with Peter and not know what to say.”
But the Church does try to say something about it quite often. In fact, we hear this story more than once in a typical church year--in Lent, it comes up as a prelude to Jesus’s slow march to Cross, and around Epiphany, we talk about it again, as one shining example of God “showing up”--appearing as dazzling light, like the star to the Magi, and as a voice from the skies, just like over the River Jordan.
On both occasions, we try to make sense of this strange encounter by reading what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration through a particular lens--a looking glass peering forward or a hand mirror turning back. And today, we’ll be doing just that: tomorrow is the actual Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, which we will interpreting in this not-so-ordinary time, not through the eyes of Peter or James or John--the first witnesses scrambling to make sense of God’s Word--but through our own glass darkly, through a lens we borrowed from Mary Magdalene in our last time together.
How does Mary’s perspective help us make sense of this new vision of Jesus? Can it even do that when she wasn’t even there? How does that story within a story change what we think we already know of ourselves and of God?
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As Colón-Emeric puts it, “The transfiguration of Christ is a mystery of light and word. It was not simply a passing event, a mountaintop experience--[it was] an invitation to see and hear and be transfigured.” In other words, just like the Incarnation and the Resurrection--these Christ-events we hold so dear in our tradition--the Transfiguration is not just a thing that happened: it’s an ongoing process that we’re invited to step into.
This is an insight we picked up from Oscar Romero, a saint we introduced in the first season of SANCTUS. In Romero’s Salvadorean context, the Feast of the Transfiguration takes on a very particular light because it coincides with a patriotic holiday marking a Spanish colonial “victory” over the indigenous population, on August 6, 1526. It’s almost impossible to see where nationalism ends and spirituality begins on this day, as the country itself--El Salvador--is named and dedicated to the Savior--El Divino Salvador del Mundo. So as you can imagine, preaching on the Transfiguration could get very complicated, very quickly.
In his many August 6 homilies, Romero transfigured that dark day in the true light of Christ, drawing his theology from ancient sources like Iraneus, who famously claimed that the Glory of God is the glory of a human life--Gloria enim Dei vivens homo.
According to Iranaeus, God reveals Godself “in different ways, in manners befitting the different stages of human receptivity to the light of his glory. In the theophanies of the Old Testament, the prophets saw God’s glory in likenesses and figures. Moses saw God’s “back” (cf. Exod. 33:23). Elijah heard God’s still small voice (cf. 1 Kings 19:12). ... On Mount Tabor, Moses and Elijah and the chosen disciples saw the glory of God face to face. The vision of the transfigured Jesus revealed the glory of God and of humanity.”
Did you catch that? The transfiguration reveals God’s glory and the glory of humanity--but how? According to Iraneus, the scintillating scandal of the Transfiguration is that it affirms our “capacity and vocation to see God and live.” That was just mind blowing for the Bishop of Lyon: that we can behold God the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and not die.
From this very basic insight, Iraneus argued that “the purpose of history is to acclimatize humans to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who is the principle of eternal life.” So there we have it--the Trinity in action! And an incredible theological vision of humanity and the Church, flashing in an instant like a lighthouse on the hill--blink and you’ll miss it!
Oscar Romero borrowed this vision and turned the crystal slightly, casting a stark light on the humble persons of Peter and James and John in our mountaintop story--
“The early Christians used to say, Gloria Dei, vivens homo. We can make this concrete by saying, Gloria Dei, vivens pauper.” (Oscar Romero)
The glory of God is the life of the poor.
In this way, Romero brought out the political implications of God’s glory for his time and place.
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And what about our own? How do we read what happened on the top of Mount Tabor? Jesus prays. Two men appear. Jesus radiates light and a voice resounds: “listen to him.” But where are the women? Why did Jesus only take Peter, James, and John? Should the history of God’s people--the whole of the Law and all of the Prophets--really be reduced to just two patriarchs? And why does God have a beloved son, anyway?
These may be uncomfortable questions--but stories like the Transfiguration catch the light a little differently when Mary Magdalene's mirrored image has already been shattered. Stigma, misidentification, erasure, and silencing--you simply cannot unsee what Mary has seen. Even the glorious vision of human dignity shared by Iraneus and Oscar Romero can cast shadows when we turn the crystal even further and see only half of God’s people--Gloria Dei, vivens homo literally means the Glory of God is the life of a man!
But here is where the Transfiguration as a process and the Trinity as a model of Divine Society helps us resolve some of these tensions. Something changed about our understanding of God on that mountain and it took a very long time for the Church to even begin to know what to say in response. It started with Peter trying his best and it did not stop when our understanding of God as relational and triune became more mature--and it will not stop just yet. The good news is that we already know something scandalous! That when we behold God in all of God’s glory: we live!
From this perspective, “listen to him” begins to sound like an invitation to speak as well--to turn a more trained ear and catch where the music is missing its accompaniment, to notice God in both the light and the darkness--to go even one more step further and search for God in the shadows, on the margins, at the thresholds--everywhere we tend to overlook. That’s what Romero does when he notices who was actually on that mountain with Jesus; that’s what we want to do when we notice who was left out.
This Trinitarian egalitarian story is writing itself in spite of the Church’s failings. That’s what Saint Vida Scudder saw in her day too. Even Iraneus argued that “the spiritualization of flesh is not instantaneous. The cycles of inhaling and exhaling the breath of life prepare the flesh for the inspiration of the Spirit. It takes time to transform the human, not on account of any weakness in the Creator, but because of the temporal nature of corporal creatures” (Edgardo Colon-Emeric).
That’s true for us as individuals, and maybe it’s even more true for the Church as a whole.
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To never get invited to the table, or--perhaps, even worse--to be the only woman in the room; this is not an experience unique to the Church’s story. Caroline Heilbrun tells us that “there are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process” (Writing A Woman’s Life, p. 11).
We might add that even in that fourth, more existential way of “writing,” our lives are always already defined by the genres and the canons of our day--every woman’s story, even the ones that eventually do get told, is shaped and molded by every other story that’s come before.
This can resound like a melancholy note to most of the world, but from the perspective of faith as “a process of ongoing midrash and story,” this is where women may find rays of hope--a transfigured hope that insists that even at our most ‘story-less,’ we still have a place in the Church and among God’s people.
This hope lives in a much larger story that we’ve called the Trinity, a cosmic story that not only contains all others, but a narrative that also demands that we remember our place in every story. Even at the Transfiguration--especially, at the Transfiguration.